


Eye Know Eye Love You Better

by hangdog



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Angst, Black Romance, Choking, Crying, M/M, Rough Sex, Topping from the Bottom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 09:41:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4999921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangdog/pseuds/hangdog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spy is a demanding lover. Demoman gives him what he wants, but Spy still abandons him every night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eye Know Eye Love You Better

“Choke me,” ordered Spy.

Demo hesitated. He was balls-deep in Spy, and his hands were very comfortable gripping behind Spy’s knees and pushing them past Spy’s head. Spy was already slick and easy and wonderful around his cock, and Demo hated to change the position.

“ _Choke me.”_

Demo immediately dropped Spy’s legs and wrapped his right hand around Spy’s long throat, pressing his thumb into his carotid artery. He was by now very good at this for all their practice, and as he tempered the bloodflow under his hand, the furious scowl of Spy’s mouth ebbed into a docile O.

Demo couldn’t deny how good it was to fuck him like this. Spy shuddered and jerked around him, twisting his hips in frantic circles that eventually succumbed to the mastery of Demo’s thrusts. Spy had a very limited range of motion: he demanded that Demo bind his wrists to Demo’s barracks bed, and he allowed Demo to move his legs as he liked, so that he ended up folded in half and pinned under the larger man. Without his voice, Spy may almost have been mistaken for the more passive participant of the two.

Demo kept his thumb locked on Spy’s artery until he recognized the telltale flutter of Spy’s eyelids. He released him momentarily, watched some of the color return to Spy’s face behind the mask, and pressed down again before Spy could regain his sternness and lose the moment. It was very easy to admire him in moments like those. Demo loved to fuck Spy to speechlessness, when he could possess him within and without, and pretend that he satisfied him as no one else could.

Spy began to struggle in a subconscious fight for breath and Demo pressed harder, bearing down on him, pinning him to the mattress until Spy ran out of air and energy. His legs, iron-tight around Demo’s waist, began to slacken in their grip. Demo watched Spy rub his wrists raw in the rope and bit back his hum of concern. Spy liked to be marked, so that he could prove his prowess of disguise in hiding said marks.

He reminded Demo of this when Demo let him breathe again, lest he pass out. “Slap me,” he said. His voice was faint, yet its thinness had a knife’s edge.

Demo throttled him with one hand and beat his face from side to side with the other. Spy’s mask pulled loose over his nose, blocking one eye, and slid over his mouth. Demo could see his lips forming one, persistent word, which he recognized. _Harder,_ Spy insisted without breath.

Demo had gone through this routine before. Harder, harder, always harder. He let Spy build him up with those silent, breathless orders, until, finally, he came to the same conclusion as always, and hit him with a closed fist. He heard it crack Spy’s cheekbone and felt a spasm run through Spy’s entire body, culminating in a blissful squeeze around his cock. Spy’s head fell limply back as he came, and Demo released his throat and banged him hard until he, too, was spent.

Demo unbound Spy’s wrists and lay beside him in silence as Spy caught his breath. As soon as Spy stopped gasping, he stood and began to dress himself.

Demo wasn’t disappointed, for he had never allowed himself to hope that this night would be any different from their routine. He often fantasized about rolling over and holding Spy close as they slept. He liked how Spy’s slim frame fit against his, and how Spy’s mask smelled of his body odor and smoke. But it was not to be—each night, Spy got what he wanted, jumped out of bed, and left as abruptly as he arrived in Demo’s door, before Demo could detect the tears in his eyes.

Demo listened closely. Sure enough, Spy continued to gasp, but there was something strange about the character of his breath. He was choked up in an entirely different way.

“Predictable, aren’t ye?”

Spy froze in the middle of buttoning his shirt and met Demo’s knowing smirk with a blank stare. His eyes were red and clouded. The fact that he had been choked would have explained it, if Demo didn’t know any better.

Spy spat, “What an inaccurate descriptor.”

“But you are.” Demo rolled over in his bed and stretched his arms before he continued. The blanket fell away from his stomach, revealing his purposefully flexed abdominal muscles below his rippling pecs, shoulders, and biceps. They had none of the intended effect on Spy, who continued to fuss with his shirt buttons. “Not at work, nay—but every time you come knocking at me door like this, after you’ve had your fill of me wicked ways, you run off while the blood’s still pumping, and leave me here all alone.”

“I don’t cuddle, if that is what you mean.” Spy put up a credible front of disinterest. He focused wholly on fixing his mask and drawing his cuffs up over the rope marks around his wrists. He was so good at hiding every last rumple and stain of evidence the day after that Demo, in the midst of his many bottles, had once doubted that they had slept together at all. It was only when Spy again appeared with his peculiar demands that Demo knew the cycle would continue.

Confronting Spy posed a risk to Demo’s new favorite ritual, but he had a reason, and he presented it as delicately as possible. “I heard ye, the other night,” he said in a gentle hush. “On your way out. I heard a sniff. Sounded like—“

The door slammed. Demo dropped his head to the sweaty pillow, cursing his foolish tactics. Of course Spy didn’t want to be soothed. He would rather retreat and guard his pride than reveal how he cried after sex.

Demo groped around the bed for the bottle of scrumpy he’d abandoned when Spy came calling just an hour earlier. As he ruminated with his drink, he cast his eye over the ropes still knotted to his bedframe. Funny, how Spy controlled every aspect of their strange arrangement, only to simulate situations in which he was helpless.

The entire affair had been Spy’s idea: he had turned up one night at Demo’s door and seduced him with all the finesse required of the deeply inebriated Scot. That is to say, Spy had merely grabbed Demo’s cock and fell to his knees. From that point on, Spy’s every request was as good as granted.

Spy liked to be fucked deep and hard, and he liked to be tied down during. He directed every step of their coitus, from the position of his legs across Demo’s shoulders, to the spankings that left him bruised for days. He wanted to be choked, he wanted to be belted, he wanted Demo to bite him and leave him sore all over. Demo never had to wonder how to go about such acts, because Spy, having wisely assessed that the scrumpy made his colleague both suggestible and greedy, described each desire in great detail. Through months of semi-weekly meetings, Spy painstakingly crafted Demo into his ideal bedfellow.

Their arrangement was by no means one sided. While Spy got everything he wanted, Demo had a responsive, perpetually available lover during his long stays at the base. He had never been a sadist: beating Spy black and blue wasn’t exactly a fantasy of his, no matter how much of a haughty, back-poking snake he was on the job, but he soon warmed to their dynamic. Spy’s way of hissing orders became a Pavlovian trigger that kept Demo rock solid and ready to fuck. Demo took pride in satisfying the finicky, elegant man. Furthermore, he enjoyed their shared secret. Sometimes, during meetings or meals, they met each other’s gaze, and he knew that Spy looked at him as he looked at no one else.

They could have continued indefinitely if Demo hadn’t wondered about Spy’s strange habit of fleeing as soon as Demo loosened the ropes. Night after night, he watched in awe as Spy donned his clothing in record time and vanished from the room without a word. The first time it had happened, he thought he had disappointed Spy, or hit him too hard, or missed some vital cue that Spy had neglected to mention. Was it his bad eye? His whisky breath? For a full week after their first night together, Demo sat in agony, dwelling on every hazily remembered detail as he drained bottle after bottle. Only Spy’s reappearance—with a fresh coil of rope, no less—had ended the torture.

That horrible, doubtful spell kept Demo from pursuing the matter further, out of fear of scaring Spy away as he suspected he had before. Spy kept well guarded whatever reasons lay behind his nightly flights. Months of coitus or not, they weren’t yet close enough to pry, and Demo wouldn’t dare.

Until he heard the sniffle. Raised more questions than it answered, really. What on Earth did Spy have to cry about? Demo waited on him like a prince, in a twisted way, and he was arguably the only man in a wide radius that knew exactly what the royal treatment entailed. Demo was completely in Spy’s thrall. Spy could turn around right then, march back into the room, and occupy Demo for hours with the minutiae of knotting rope and strangling him with his tie and fucking him until they were both sore, and Demo knew that he would comply without question.

Demo considered that Spy was more delicate than he seemed, and wondered if he couldn’t control himself after the rush of stimulus and the subsequent crash of adrenaline when they ended their sessions. This was a bizarre possibility. Despite Spy’s slight frame and fastidious economy of motion on the battlefield, Demo had never considered him weak or fragile. Even if he had, Spy’s way of barking orders like a general while being simultaneously penetrated and throttled would have changed his mind quickly enough.

Perhaps the answer he sought lay therein. Spy also saw himself as a tough customer. He would never admit to something as shameful as crying after sex, not even to the man who knew how much he liked rough play, and who took extra care to cover him when they were at work, and who bribed him to visit for the night with curated gifts of wine and cheese. No, they certainly were not yet close enough to pry, all romantic gestures be damned.

Demo groaned aloud. In a miserable burst of ambition, he drained his bottle of scrumpy. Spy’s lack of trust in him should have been obvious. How confusing, to literally hold Spy’s life in his hands when he throttled him, and yet to be denied access to his inner thoughts. He had taken his infatuation too far. Obviously, Spy had no interest in anything but Demo’s body and his ability to follow orders. How pathetic, to bite his nails over the deliberately obscured intentions of a man who probably saw him as interchangeable with any other lover. If Spy had any feelings to share with him, he would have by now, wouldn’t he?

Demo rummaged under his bed once more. The next bottle he found was, blessedly, full.

 

* * *

 

Their confrontation marked the beginning of the longest stretch without sex that Demo had seen since Spy first took an interest in him. He had once recognized a pattern of Spy’s visits after particularly stressful battles. Now, after several draining workdays, Spy’s distinctive, coded knock never once rattled his door.

Demo grew so desperate to see him that he even mistook Soldier’s booming knock at the door for Spy at first. He threw open his door with a hopeful greeting and open arms. Luckily, their self-appointed leader was too excited about an emergency battle meeting to wonder why Demo greeted him as “Spy.”

“Yeah, get the frog too!” Soldier marched down the hall to the next door. “This can’t wait until morning!”

It was only when the team assembled in the war room, bleary-eyed and annoyed with the hour, that they realized it could have waited until morning, or indeed until Hell froze over.

“A squadron of chickens has assembled outside of the fence, men,” Soldier raved, slapping his poorly drawn diagram of the chicken menace on the chalkboard. “We are now divided on two fronts!”

There had been no need for Demo to get Spy after all. He was already waiting in the darkest possible corner, watching the door from the corner of his eye. Demo knew Spy saw him come in, but he expected no acknowledgement, and received none.

As Soldier ranted about the army of desert chickens that had come to usurp their position, Demo tried to watch Spy when he thought he wasn’t looking. As the only fully dressed member of the team, Spy slouched stylishly in his corner, watching Soldier with blatant contempt and sucking down a pungent cigarette. Through the balaclava, Demo noticed dark bags under his eyes. Alone, that wasn’t unusual, but together with his slouch and the way his wrinkled clothes hung on his frame, Spy looked nothing like his usual composed self. Demo wondered if he had slept in his suit. Was this about him? Was it something else?

All at once, his worry and indignation came to a head. Damn Spy for being so bloody mysterious. Demo would not have it. He would solve this nonsense once and for all, even if it meant the end of their affair.

“…and when the chickens figure out plan A and launch an all-out assault on the barricade,” Soldier was saying, as he drew an arrow from the crudely depicted flock to the crooked rectangle that represented their base, “we loop around and bring in plan B! Confused?” He jabbed his finger at Heavy, who wearily massaged the bridge of his nose. “Good! Stay confused! Remember, if _we_ don’t know what we’re doing, _they_ won’t know what we’re doing!”

“I think we have heard quite enough,” said Medic, coming to the rescue of his partner. Heavy looked at him gratefully as the Medic continued, “Our performance will suffer if we don’t have adequate sleep.”

Before Soldier could argue, Engineer cut in, “And we won’t be much of a match for them wily chickens if we’re exhausted, will we?”

“Mmpphh,” agreed Pyro, without looking up from an in-progress crayon drawing of their chicken foes roasting on spits.

Scout scoffed. “This is stupid. Who ever heard of a buncha chickens attackin’ anyone?”

Sniper slapped his forehead. “Well done, mate.”

“ARE YOU QUESTIONING MY TACTICS, PRIVATE?” Soldier surged across the table and grabbed the Scout by the collar. “THOSE CHICKENS KNOW MORE ABOUT BATTLE THAN YOU HAVE IN YOUR LITTLE FINGER!”

“That don’t even make sense, ya screwball! Let go’a me! It’s too late for this shit—we got work tomorrow!”

As Engineer and Medic stepped in to break up the fight, Demo noticed Spy slink away in the midst of the commotion.

He followed him down to the end of the hallway, but when Spy’s hand dropped to the level of his waist, Demo hurried up to him, fearing that he would activate his watch and vanish. “Wait!”

Bemused, Spy withdrew his cigarette case instead, and lit a second on the end of his first. He didn’t so much as look at Demo. “I am very busy,” he said.

Demo sputtered. He clenched his fists. How had he ever been worried about this—this—

“If it’s all the same,” Spy continued as Demo glowered at him, “I intended to come to you tonight, but then I saw Soldier at your door.”

“Yeah? How did you mean to do that? Show up again, get whatever ye want from me, and fuck off without so much as a good night?”

“How sentimental of you,” drawled Spy, blowing a smoke ring for good measure.

“Sentimental!” Demo threw up his hands in desperation. “It’s not normal, what you do to me!”

“There is nothing normal about what we do,” Spy answered, still speaking as coolly as if they were discussing the weather, “but if you are displeased, we can end it.”

“I don’t want to end it. I want to talk to you like a bloody person.”

“Right here in the hall?” Spy gestured to the war room door. The others began to emerge, threatening the privacy of their conversation.

“Whenever—wherever ye want!” Demo amended, “You owe me.”

“Do I?” Spy looked at him for the first time.

Demo studied the exhaustion in Spy’s face, until Spy turned his head away. Demo’s suspicions were correct: something _was_ bothering him, even if Spy seemed hellbent on convincing Demo otherwise. “Yes,” Demo confirmed. “I do everything you say. _You_ can do this for _me_.”

Silence followed. Just as Demo prepared to insist again, Spy sighed. “Very well. But can it wait until tomorrow? This fiasco has drained all of my energy,” he said, gesturing down the long hall, to where Scout was attempting to wriggle out of Soldier’s chokehold.

Demo grit his teeth. “Fine,” he answered.

Spy, visibly relieved to put an end to the ordeal for now, left him alone to catalogue his reserves of scrumpy. This night would be a long one.

 

* * *

Demo spent the following day in Hell. Soldier’s enforced lack of sleep, combined with a vicious hangover, a particularly spirited BLU offense on their base, and his frustration with Spy, meant that he had neither the energy nor the will to work to his usual standards. A hangover should never have been enough to affect a Highland Demolition Man’s performance on the job, but the more he fixated on how he should overcome it, the sloppier he became. He tried downing bottle after bottle and the problem only intensified. Demo was more inebriated than he had ever been during work, and somehow he only felt worse.

The whole problem came to a head when he blew himself up for the third time with a foolishly bounced grenade, of all things. While it killed Demo, the blast coincidentally propelled a charging BLU Scout to safety into the upper levels of their base, out of range of the Engineer’s sentry. The little bastard zipped past their defenses and thwarted them once again, continuing RED’s long line of failures that day. Demo wasn’t the only one too tired to work well, but this stunt bought him the ire of the entire team, even the normally placid Engineer.

“Now, that was just a boneheaded move, boy,” Engineer grumbled as Demo limped back out of Respawn. The softly spoken insult was as good as a screaming fit from anyone else.

Soldier, who charged in at that moment from the way of the battlements, took care of the shouting for him. “I HAVE NEVER SEEN SUCH UNCOORDINATED DEFENSE IN MY LIFE, MAGGOT!” Demo winced. His headache had been a monster before Respawn-associated sickness elevated it into sheer nightmare, and Soldier was directly in his face. “DROP AND GIVE ME TWENTY!”

Demo protested, “I should get back out there—“

Soldier began to circle around him, on his blind side. Demo stepped to counter him, but, drunkenly, almost lost his footing. “NOT UNTIL YOU TURN AROUND, DROP DOWN, AND SWEAT OUT THAT FAILURE, YOU STINKING, CLUMSY, STUPID SON OF A—“

A shadow flickered behind Soldier. He spasmed, and then he toppled forward. A knife jutted from his back.

Demo gripped his bottle, hefting it in confused panic as the Engineer activated an alarm and aimed his rifle into the dark. The BLU Spy? How had he killed Soldier right in front of the sentry and cloaked again without being detected?

A shape melted out of the shadows. Demo swung.

“Tsk,” scolded the RED Spy, _his_ Spy, as he swerved out of Demo’s reach. “Wrong one.”

Demo staggered back and looked down at the fallen Soldier. A hologram faded around Soldier’s body, revealing a very dead BLU Spy under the disguise.

“His American accent is laughable,” snorted the RED Spy as he retrieved his knife. “I am surprised neither of you noticed, but I suppose he was loud enough to pass. And telling you to turn around? How transparent.”

“Thanks, lad,” Demo answered. His voice was so full of incongruous emotion that Engineer gave him a strange look.

“Tsk,” repeated Spy. “Such crude insults,” he added under his breath, just before he vanished in his usual puff of smoke.

Engineer holstered his gun and went back to tightening the bolts on his sentry. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he likes you.”

Demo shrugged. Suddenly, his pounding head felt like less of a problem. He returned to the front lines, where the real Soldier was, of course, still raving about chickens. Out of sheer good luck, Demo managed not to blow himself up again before they clocked out.

 

* * *

 

His brief encounter with Spy during work eased Demo’s mind somewhat, although he still found himself restless and impatient at the end of the day. He had managed not to slip out of the mire of drunkenness he’d sustained throughout, and as he sat on his bed, waiting up for Spy like an anxious wife, bleakness again crept over his thoughts.

What was he doing? Everything about their relationship, if he could even call it that, pointed to one conclusion. Spy wanted to be fucked, and that was all. If he desired anything else, he would have demanded it already, and he certainly wouldn’t flee the room like his arse was on fire once they were done.  If he wept, well, he didn’t trust Demo enough to let him see it.

Then again, Demo should have expected that. No one was as dedicated to mystery as Spy. Sexual acts were one thing, apparently, but when Demo knew absolutely nothing else about him, he could hardly form a coherent image of the whole. All he knew was that Spy was the sort of man to deflect any inquiries to his true nature. He would probably deny being French under interrogation, and pass a polygraph as he did.

A knock on the door interrupted Demo’s fretful reverie. It was the code. He leapt out of bed, trailing his sheets around his ankles, and opened his door without thought to how disheveled he had become. A broad, stupid smile stretched across his face.

Spy met his unbridled joy with the look of a man before a firing squad. His mouth was a taut line, and his eyes were shuttered like the windows of a Blitz-bombed house. Even his nostrils flared with horselike stress. By contrast, his voice was almost hilariously controlled in its coldness. “You reek,” he said.

“Well, don’t look too happy to see me.” Demo felt his smile drop, but he stepped aside all the same, ushering Spy in and closing the door before he could flee. He slipped between the door and Spy for good measure, wielding his bottle of scrumpy as if he could truly compel Spy to stay by force.

Spy looked about the room, analyzing Demo’s strewn about work clothes, the freshly emptied bottles, and the trail of bedsheets. Demo watched the gears turn in his head for a moment before Spy about-faced and attempted to seduce him with a kiss.

On any other day, it would have worked. Demo did lose himself at first. Spy was a fantastic, sensual kisser. He could make Demo weak in the knees with nothing more than a flick of his tongue, and he had a way of sucking Demo’s tongue that made his cock stiffen in eagerness for the same attention.

Demo had never resisted Spy before. It was one of the most difficult feats of his life, but with a mighty effort, he managed to pull back from the kiss and simultaneously grasp Spy’s wrists. He pinned him up against the wall, with Spy’s hands by his head. He wasn’t stupid enough to think that he had overpowered Spy. He had tried before, and found that Spy was like an eel: impossible to hold, and likely to sting you on his way out of your grip. If Spy wanted to be pinned, he told Demo to do so. The fact that he managed it now meant only that Spy allowed it.

Spy stared at him. “Are you going to punish me?” he asked.

“ _Punish_ ye?” Demo dropped Spy and backed away. He instantly regretted it. They were at opposite ends of the room now, as Spy pressed himself against the wall. “I only wanted to keep you from running off again—or distracting me. You’re very good at that, you know.”

Spy fixed his clothes like a ruffled cat. “You want to talk. That is essentially a punishment.”

“For fuck’s sake,” groaned Demo. “Fine, we don’t need a chat. Can’t you just tell me that you’re not running off every night because I’m hurting you, or because I’m not good enough, or because you hate me?”

“You are that insecure?” Spy clucked his tongue in disapproval. “If you did not drink so much, perhaps you would have learned to cope with your emotions naturally, instead of anesthetizing yourself.”

Stunned by the cruel accuracy of this assessment, and by how easily Spy had turned his own concern against him, Demo fumbled for a quick rejoinder.

He wasn’t fast enough. Spy continued, “I wouldn’t keep coming back to you if I was dissatisfied, Tavish.”

Demo shivered. Spy had never called him by his name before. It almost covered the sting of his insults—almost. “I don’t think I want ye coming back,” he lied, “not if you’re always going to run away.” He inhaled deeply, preparing himself for another attempt at the statement that could end them. “I know that you cry, after. I want to help ye.”

Spy looked nauseous. He crossed his arms over his midsection, cradling his stomach. His eyes lost focus. Demo wanted to hold him. He forced himself to stay quiet, let his words hang in the air, until Spy finally found strength to respond. “There is nothing to help. I have always been this way.”

“That’s fine.” Demo took a step towards him, but flinched to a halt when Spy moved away in an unconscious jerk. “Stay with me,” he begged. “Don’t go. I’d do anything to please you. You can trust me. I won’t judge you.” He had meant to release each of these heartfelt statements over the course of a reasonable conversation, but one led to another, until he couldn’t stop himself. “I can’t stand it when you leave. I miss you so.”

Spy tortured him with another long silence, one that made Demo himself feel as nauseous as Spy continued to look. Demo braced himself for another aspersion, a bevy of them. What a pathetic, ugly, stinking, simpering fool he was. Spy used, insulted, and abandoned him, and Demo responded with his heart on a platter. He was stupid to insist on this discussion. He could see now that it had been kinder of Spy to avoid him, to spare them both the humiliation, than to confront him with the truth.

Demo no longer felt like standing, or like being awake, for that matter. He took another drink from his bottle and sat down on his bed. “You can go,” he said, hating how thin his voice sounded. He put his head in his hands.

A moment passed. He listened for the door. Spy had singularly silent footsteps, but the door would click when he left.

The door made no sound. Instead, the mattress beside Demo sagged, on the side of his good eye. Spy’s warmth pressed against him. Spy gently worked the bottle out of Demo’s hand and laced their fingers together. Demo was still not used to the softness of Spy’s palms without his gloves. He lifted his head.

Spy removed his mask, which he had only done before in the dark. The balaclava left little to the imagination, in Demo’s opinion, and was in many ways a simple formality of Spy’s uniform, but its absence had a remarkably humanizing effect. Spy had prominent tan lines around his eyes and mouth, and his graying, receding hair was plastered to his head from its long hours under the mask.

Spy’s half-lidded eyes met Demo’s with a shot of electricity. “Punish me,” he ordered.

Demo wanted to deny him. He wanted to teach him that he couldn’t play games. He prepared to throw Spy out of his room for being a conniving, manipulative, selfish backstabber, and give him a taste of insecurity in his own appearance.

Instead, he indulged his request. He ripped Spy’s clothes from him, enjoying each of Spy’s breathy, insincere protests about the cost of his uniform as he destroyed buttons and cuffs alike. “Try and fix yourself up after this,” he taunted, dashing each part of Spy’s tailored suit to the floor. He threw him on his back on the bed, ignoring how Spy’s elbow collided with a painful crack against the opposite wall. Demo climbed on top of him, crushing him with his weight, and marked his neck with a series of progressively darker and bloodier bites. The balaclava would cover them all, but Demo relished the thought of Spy carrying them for weeks, and seeing them in the mirror whenever he undressed.

Demo wanted to spank him, but he had no patience to pull him over his knee. Drunk as he was, Demo wanted to fuck _now_ , with no further preamble. Spy writhed and rutted against his thigh as Demo pulled out his cock. Demo flipped him on to his belly and spat on his ass, mustering as much contempt as he could into the gesture. Spy howled like an alley cat when Demo pierced him, and Demo compromised on his desire to spank him by beating his thighs and hips with his palm as he plowed him back and forth. He hit him so hard that bruises formed instantly, and Spy shuddered and arched, clenching at each impact with a heavenly press around Demo.

Demo grasped the back of Spy’s neck and used it as a handle to bend Spy like a bowstring against him. He fucked Spy in short, sharp jabs near the end, intermittently stroking Spy’s jerking prick to its stuttering completion. Demo bit his shoulder bloody when he came, and kept hitting him after, as his cock softened inside Spy and Spy’s noises became choked with sobs where there had been pleasurable moans.

Demo stopped hitting him and pulled out when he recognized that Spy was crying. This was it. This was the moment that he had missed each night. He felt strangely hollow, and ashamed of himself, as the aftershocks of his orgasm ebbed and left him flaccid and oversensitive to the weeping he had caused. Without Spy’s constant orders, Demo suddenly saw his rough ministrations as nothing short of villainous, even if Spy had demanded punishment.

Spy, still shuddering with short, gasping breaths, began to pull away. Demo instinctively grasped him around the waist. He lay down on his side, coaxing Spy next to him. His heart stopped when Spy resisted at first, but then, Spy hung his head and lay with his back against Demo’s chest. He allowed Demo to hold him as he wept. After a minute or so, Demo encouraged Spy to roll over and face him. Spy reluctantly acquiesced to this as well.

Demo tucked Spy’s head under his chin. He felt the moisture of Spy’s tears on his neck, and the flicker of his long eyelashes. Spy’s fists bunched up against Demo’s chest, pinned between their bodies. He stroked Spy’s back and pulled him closer. Spy shivered in the warm bedroom and muffled his hiccoughs in Demo’s shoulder.

“Shh,” Demo began. “It’s all right, love.”

“Don’t,” Spy choked out. “Don’t speak. Just hold me.”

Demo struggled to be happy with this. It was everything he wanted, and yet he still felt empty. His “punishment” of Spy was really just a rehash of everything that he knew Spy enjoyed, but he couldn’t help but take Spy’s sobs to heart, as if he had personally tormented him to tears with harsher sex than ever. Worse, what if his actions made no difference? Spy wept no matter what they did. How likely was it that Spy had merely consented to humor Demo with this new aspect of their relationship, without actually intending any real bond?

Demo fretted so much that he didn’t notice as Spy’s breathing slowed and calmed. He did notice when Spy began to move. Demo braced for rejection.

Instead, Spy squirmed closer and kissed him. Demo froze, and then he moaned like an idiot and squeezed Spy in a tight embrace. Spy responded in kind, grasping him with such warmth that Demo felt dewy tears in his own eye.

“I saved you today,” said Spy when they broke apart. Demo, baffled by the non-sequitor, could only stare. “The BLU impostor came for you, and I intervened.”

“Ah, right,” Demo agreed, remembering how Soldier had been the BLU Spy’s disguise. “You would have done the same for anyone else.”

“No. Anyone else would not have been too drunk to defend himself.” Demo growled, but Spy spoke over him. “And his insults were too much to bear. You did not deserve such abuse. I sought retribution.”

“You...defended my honor?” Demo grinned. “I see. You’re the only one allowed to insult me.”

“I am merely honest with you about your uncontrolled drinking habit.” Spy once again spoke over Demo’s protests. “Other than that, I am very fond of you.”

Demo wiped his thumb over the wet trail on Spy’s cheek. “I’m very fond of you, too.”

 

* * *

 

“At ease, men!”

It was well past sunset. The workday had been over for five hours at that point, and everyone was already sitting down with a beer in hand, but that mattered little to Soldier’s military fantasies. He strutted in front of his team, saluting each of them with pride.

They sat in a circle around a raging bonfire, which Pyro lovingly tended. Engineer took charge of rotating a handsome number of plucked chickens on a spit over the flames, in addition to rows of corn on a makeshift grill. The smell was enough to make anyone’s mouth water. The entire team was in attendance for their celebration of their ultimate victory in the Poultry Wars.

Soldier’s speech rang out across the blue desert night. “Yesterday, we were losers. Commies! Hippies! Today, we are winners! We are real, red-blooded Americans! You made your country proud today, men!”

Spy leaned over to whisper to Demo. “Will he ever figure it out?” he muttered.

“I won’t tell him if none of the other lads will,” Demo said.

“Yes, is good day to be American feast!” boomed Heavy on cue. He slapped Medic’s back.

“Oy,” sighed Medic. “Ja. Ve are Amerikaner.”

“That’s the spirit, Fritz!” Soldier pointed to Pyro and Engineer. “All right, boys, let’s get those cooked double-time! Veterans like us can only get fresh meat when we kill it for ourselves, and I am damned sure not looking forward to eating out of a can again—but I will! For America!”

Spy shared a private smirk with Demo, one that made Demo’s stomach flip end over end. “I hope he doesn’t expect us to eat those in solidarity. I have had enough American brotherhood for the rest of my life.”

“I know a brother ye can eat,” Demo muttered, nudging Spy’s thigh with his knee.

Spy tittered and lit another cigarette. The smoke added a sultry curl to his whispers. “We make our move when these fools gorge themselves. They will never miss us.”

As the mercenaries stuffed their gullets with roast chicken, grilled corn, and chilled beer, Spy and Demo, on separate occasions, excused themselves to piss in the desert.

“Don’t know who they think they’re fooling,” commented Sniper through a mouthful of meat.

“Yeah!” agreed Scout, spraying corn in his enthusiasm. “I gotta take a wicked shit, too, but I wouldn’t lie about it. It’s just facts.”

Sniper shook his head. “You really are as dumb as you look, huh?”

“Hey, I look _way_ smarter than I am, asshole!”

 

 

From across the desert plain, Demo could hear Scout’s squawking interspersed with Sniper’s hoarse shouts and Soldier’s bellowing commands. When he heard Heavy laughing uproariously and Medic shouting for order, he not only knew that the soft spoken Engineer and mumbling Pyro had probably joined in the fray, but he was without a doubt that no one would come looking for him or Spy.

“You probably want to join them,” commented Spy. He actually had to piss, and he had found the one rock for miles behind which to relieve himself. His delicate discretion amused Demo so. “The drunken revelry and fistfighting would suit you.”

“There’ll be other chances.” Demo wrapped his arm around Spy’s shoulders. “Don’t tell them, but I saw a few chickens running about when Pyro was getting the fire together. Ours is an endless war.”

“How accurate.” Spy leaned against Demo’s side. For a moment, they enjoyed the cool desert night together. “Kiss me,” Spy said at last.

It sounded like more of a request than an order, but Demo responded at once. He grasped Spy’s chin and tilted his head back in a kiss for the storybooks. His gentle touch was different from the usual, but Spy responded well enough.

“Undress me,” Spy said.

Demo reached for Spy’s lapel, but something stopped him. Spy met his eyes and immediately reached for his balaclava, but Demo shook his head before Spy could denude his face.

“It’s not that. I just…are you going to cry again, after?”

Spy pulled away from him.

“No! It’s not a problem, really.” Demo grasped Spy’s wrist out of desperation, but he held him for no more than a second before Spy effortlessly broke his grip. “Please, wait. I just want to know why.”

Spy sneered. “You still think that it has something to do with you?”

“Well—maybe!”

“I told you, insecurity is most unbecoming. I expect better from my lovers.”

“That’s just it. Do you always cry with your—lovers—or is it just me? Am I the only one that you trust enough to stay with?” Demo spread his palms in front of him, as if indicating that he was unarmed. “I need to know.”

Spy considered this. Demo hated how he couldn’t tell if the expression on his face was one of sincerity or deception. “Yes,” he said at last. “You are the only one.”

The statement was expertly crafted, and too good to be true. Demo pressed, “I’m the only one who makes you cry, or the only one you trust?”

Spy exhaled through his nose. He grasped Demo’s hands. He did not quite look at him as he spoke. Demo recognized that eye contact meant Spy was lying, so he hoped that the opposite must be true. Spy told him, “You are the only one I trust to make me weep. I need it, and you are good at it. The experience has endeared me to you. I did not think that you would want to bother with the aftermath of what I request from you, but you do. I thank you for it.”

Demo squeezed Spy’s hands. “That’s all I wanted to know,” he said through the lump in his throat. “You don’t have to be ashamed. You’re safe with me.”

Spy lowered his head and leaned against Demo’s chest. “ _Mon grand_ ,” he sighed, “you are too generous for your own good.”

“I know,” answered Demo, as he wrapped his arms around Spy. “You only came to me out of convenience, for as long as we’re on the job.” Spy did not contradict him. “But I’m glad that you did.”

And as he held Spy under the stars, for the first time in a long time, Demo knew happiness that came from neither sulfur nor ethanol. Spy-spurred endorphins were precious to him now. Eventually, he knew, this new addiction would lose its unique high. He would overindulge in an effort to regain that first sense of bliss, and then he would oversaturate his experience until he wrung out every last drop of pleasure and perverted even his joyful memories with the desperate need for more, more, more…but right then, everything was fine.

“Undress me,” insisted Spy, interrupting the downward spiral of Demo’s thoughts. Demo hurried to comply.


End file.
